Australia and Britain have stopped vaginal mesh implants...

1of2Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., sued a manufacturer of vaginal mesh in 2016 when she was California attorney general.Photo: Sarah Silbiger / New York Times 2018

2of2Then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris answered questions during a town hall meeting in Oakland in July 2016. She filed suit against a mesh maker in September 2016.Photo: Michael Noble Jr. / The Chronicle 2016

Dear Gov. Brown,

Here’s a question for you: What’s a vagina worth?

That’s probably not an issue you have spent much time pondering, but you should.

Currently, tens of thousands of women living in California are suffering every day from severe, often permanent, injuries due to implants of transvaginal mesh.

They were among some roughly 2 million women in America who received mesh implants to repair conditions that affect some 30 percent women after childbirth or as they age: pelvic organ prolapse and stress urinary incontinence. The mesh is supposed to support the vaginal wall, bladder and uterus.

But those mesh implants were not tested first in vaginas, thanks to loose regulations demanded by the medical device lobby. These women were guinea pigs.

This is one of the biggest scandals in the modern women’s health care. Dr. Tom Margolis, a Burlingame pelvic surgeon and an expert on pelvic mesh, warned the Food and Drug Administration in 2011 that vaginal mesh implants were unsafe. His mesh removal surgery wait list stretches to mid-2019.

However, in the United States, companies that make vaginal mesh continue to advertise and gynecologists continue to implant it. Why is this happening?

Money. The mesh implant makers have amassed billions of dollars in sales over the past decade, and they don’t want to lose this lucrative revenue stream. Nor do the ob-gyns who were aggressively recruited by mesh marketers’ sales reps, with promises of wealth. Sales reps even helped train the doctors in the implant procedure.

It is time for California to stop vaginal mesh surgery in-state while it reviews the extent of tragic results. This can be part of your legacy, Gov. Brown.

California saw more vaginal mesh implants than other states — perhaps as many as 100,000, according to mesh experts. It is estimated that 10 percent of the women will need partial or complete mesh removal to pull the plastic from organs it has cut. In my reporting, doctors and patients told me that implant surgeries cost about $3,500 but the removals are in the range of $50,000. The British health system says mesh removal surgeries are costing it millions of pounds.

Among them was a woman from Colorado who has had five surgeries at UCLA since 2015 for mesh removal and pelvic repair. Mesh had caused inversion of her small intestine, which was hanging out. Her vagina was so damaged by mesh that it was removed and reconstructed, to a point. Not surprisingly, she calls mesh deterioration “genital mutilation.”

In 2016, the California Attorney General — then Kamala Harris — paved the way for California to stop these implants. In 2016, she announced that California was suing Johnson & Johnson for deceptive marketing. Harris said, “Johnson and Johnson put millions of women at risk of severe health problems.” The company sold 787,232 devices nationally from 2008 to 2014, more than 42,000 in California. And Johnson & Johnson was only one of four companies selling mesh in California.

The company that manufactured the polypropylene used in mesh warned that it was not intended as an implant in humans. A clinical trial in the United States was halted in 2009 because of the shocking 15 percent complication rate among patients within three months. Mesh-maker executives have said under oath that they knew this plastic could shrink, move and perforate organs.

But companies sold billions of dollars of vaginal mesh anyway.

I’ll bet their investors know what a vagina is worth.

People tell me they’re “uncomfortable” discussing vaginal mesh. Katrina Spradley of Georgia, who organized the rally for Mesh Awareness in Chicago, can discuss the “cheese grater” that her mesh felt like. Spradley has also had removal surgery at UCLA. She talks freely about the incident before her repair operation, when a piece of mesh that pushed through her vaginal wall unexpectedly scratched her husband’s penis during sex.

Now that is uncomfortable.

If California acts to halt these mesh surgeries, other states will follow.

As one of your last official acts, Gov. Brown, show that California is still first in protecting women’s health.